It's
not that often that an author has the pleasure of seeing the second
edition of a book come out several decades after it first appeared. When
that does happen, the title in question is probably a novel or a work
of belles lettres, rather than a monograph. Rarer still would
be the book that has become topical again in the meantime – pertinent to
the stress and strain of public life, perhaps even more than it was
when first issued.

So the 50th anniversary edition of Walter Nugent’s The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism, now out from the University of Chicago Press,
is an exceptional book on a number of counts. I’m by no means sure that
the author, who is professor emeritus of history at the University of
Notre Dame, would feel all that comfortable as a guest on one of those
public-affairs TV programs where everybody yells, interrupting each
other and stomping all over the fine points of any argument with cleated
boots. He might get crushed.

But the book, which once intervened in a fierce historiographical
debate, offers a challenge to how Americans understand and discuss
politics now.

If taken seriously, Nugent’s book might do irreparable damage to a
good deal of the prevailing nonsense, which is the sign of a career
well-spent.

To put his contribution in context, we’d have to
take a look back at a well-received and influential book published
during the last really disastrous global economic crisis anyone alive
still can remember. John D. Hicks’s The Populist Revolt (1931)
stood as the definitive work on the subject almost as soon as it
appeared in 1931 – the most comprehensive treatment, until that point,
of the rise and fall of the People’s Party of the 1890s. Hicks treated
it as a heroic if flawed challenge by Midwestern and Southern farmers to
the economic powers-that-be driving them into the ground through tight
credit, mortgage foreclosures, and monopolistic control of railroad
shipping costs and the market prices of agricultural goods. The
Populists (so dubbed, it is said, by a journalist with a little Latin)
became a force to reckon with in some states, and their demand for
reform to limit the power of monopolists and financiers resonated beyond
the corn and cotton belts.

By 1896 the party had effectively fused with the Democrats – in
roughly the sense, as one Populist put it, that Jonah fused with the
whale. In the wake of FDR, the populists of the 1890s could be seen as
proto-New Dealers. And so they were understood, in keeping with Hicks’s
overall rendering of their history, for the next 20 or 30 years. But a
revisionist perspective on the People’s Party emerged in the 1950s for
which the Populists embodied something much more problematic: a mass
movement animated as much by feelings of powerless rage as by rational
economic concerns. Other figures worked out some of the argument before
Richard Hofstadter published The Age of Reform (1955). But for
the sake of convenience, and in recognition of the range and depth of
his influence, we might as well call it the Hofstadter thesis. Aspects
of it also appeared in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1964).

In contrast to Hicks’s understanding of the People’s Party as an
early force for progressive reforms (including the graduated income
tax), the Hofstadter thesis saw populism as a reactionary response to
industrial production, urbanization, and the role of the United States
in the world market place. These forces were undermining the status of
the independent, rural farmer – who responded with nativism, conspiracy
theories, and a rather hysterical yearning to return to the fine old
ways of the good old days. Hofstadter quoted anti-Semitic statements by
populist figures, sounding like something from a speech delivered at the
end of a torchlight parade in Germany circa 1932. While he stopped
short of calling the People’s Party proto-fascist, Hofstadter did
situate the populists in a continuum of episodes of irrational American
civic life running from the Salem witch trials to McCarthyism. (More
recent examples might be adduced here, of course.)

The revisionist perspective held that the populists of the 1890s were
suffering from “status anxiety,” leading to political protest directed
as much against cultural change as economic conditions. And if populists
and McCarthyites alike were xenophobic, anti-intellectual, and
belligerently nationalistic – well, in that case the Hofstadter thesis
seemed to make some compelling points.

A very big “if,” that one. Hofstadter drew on
then-recent psychoanalytic and sociological ideas, and wrote with such
power and grace that the two Pulitzer Prizes he received (one of them
for The Age of Reform) seem like a matter of course. But the
doctoral dissertation that Walter Nugent wrote at the University of
Chicago – published, two years after it was accepted, as The Tolerant Populists
– went after the Hofstadter thesis with hammer and tongs on its one
major weakness: the senior historian hadn’t logged much time in the
archives.

Nugent did, and it shows. He focused on Kansas – the epicenter of the
Populist political earthquake, where the movement began and quickly
established the state’s second most powerful party. Besides analyzing
the available demographic and electoral data for the 1890s, Nugent went
over scores of newspapers, large and small, including papers published
by and for the state’s German-language communities.

The picture emerging from his research is anything but one of
close-minded and nostalgic people who gloried in their status as native
Kansans, obsessed with bitter feelings about foreigners, paranoid about
the outside world, and ready to take it out on immigrants in general or
Jews in particular.

In fact the evidence shows, time and again, exactly the opposite.
People’s Party organizers appealed for support from every immigrant
group in the state and often won their votes. Populist speakers and
editorialists were infuriated that Kansans were being dispossessed from
their homes by foreign investors who bought up real estate on
speculation. A basic populist demand was that the law should ensure that
land would be held by people who worked it, but the hostility was
directed at foreign landlords; the populists made no effort to restrict
the purchase of land by the non-native born who wanted to farm.

The anti-Semitic rants that Hofstadter quoted from populist writings
were indeed virulent, but Nugent reports finding only a few examples of
anything like them out of the countless documents he read from Kansas.
Attacks on the Rothschilds, an eminent Anglo-Jewish banking family,
certainly did show up in Populist denunciations – as did similar
denunciations of the Morgans and the families of various robber barons.
Nugent points out that Jew-baiting and immigrant-bashing were far more
common among mainstream politicians and shapers of elite opinion, and
that one Jewish writer “had heard so little about Populist anti-Semitism
that he sent the Populist governor [of Kansas]… a pamphlet beginning,
‘Moses, the Populist Law-Giver.’ ”

People’s Party candidates in Kansas included an African-American
minister (for state auditor), a woman (for state superintendent for
public instruction), and a Jew (for postmaster) -- plus too many
recently naturalized citizens of German, Welsh, Irish, Swiss, Czech, and
other stock, running for too many positions, to list.

Except for “a brogue here and an umlaut there,” says Nugent,
they were no different from other Populists. The policies they
championed – such as state ownership of railroads and telephone
providers, inflationary monetary policies that would reduce the value of
their mortgages, and laws prohibiting alien ownership of land – were in
response to real economic hardship, not murky unconscious impulses or
complaints about cultural disrespect.

“A strong assertion is easier to make than a strong case,” writes Nugent about the revisionists of the 1950s. Around the time The Tolerant Populists
first appeared, Norman Pollack and C. Vann Woodward made broadly
similar critiques of the Hofstadter thesis, with Michael Rogin
continuing the challenge a few years later. But when Nugent took on the
Pulitzer-winning historian in the early 1960s, it must have looked like
David sizing up Goliath. By the end of the book, the giant has hit the
ground but the counter-evidence just keeps flying.

In his preface to the new edition, Nugent makes a very quick sweep
over developments in the historiography on populism in the intervening
years (to do more than that would have undoubtedly required something as
long as the original text) and fulminates over how imprecisely the word
populism is used now. It “has become a useful word in dodging informed
thinking,” he says. “In American media, it has become an all-purpose
put-down.”

Worse, it is most often applied to phenomena, such as the Tea Party,
which tend to be as nativist and prone to flight-of-thought as anything
subsumed under the Hofstadter thesis. The common element in the reforms
proposed by the Populists 120 years ago was, Nugent writes, “to use the
government as an instrument on the people’s behalf, rather than on
behalf of special interests, monopolies, unregulated banks and other
corporations, and (to use today’s term) the one percent.”

The movement “wanted to augment the use of governments, not diminish
or circumvent them, because, as the Populist congressman Jerry Simpson
put it, ‘the government is the people, and we are the people.’ ”

I don’t know if “Sockless Jerry” would have much of a chance in
today’s electoral arena, but sentiments like that wouldn’t get him many
well-paid speaking engagements.